City busy repairing runways

Flight decrease allows more work at O'Hare

O'Hare International Airport has remained as busy an airfield as ever despite thousands of fewer flights since the terrorist attacks last year.

But instead of banks of airplanes, O'Hare has been filled with front-end loaders and concrete mixers making repairs and improvements on nearly 12 miles of runways and 39 miles of taxiways.

While airports in other cities have cut back on projects because they are taking in less money from such sources as airline landing fees and parking garage taxes, O'Hare officials have dipped into reserves to accelerate the projects, saying that making an extra investment in maintenance now will pay off by being able to keep open more runways and aircraft gates when the demand rebounds.

"[It's] a unique opportunity to move ahead with projects totaling 225,000 square feet," said John Kosiba, chief of construction and development for the Chicago Department of Aviation. "We are not going to be able to do a lot of the work on the taxiways, ramps and runways when air traffic picks up."

In a normal year O'Hare would spend about $2 million replacing the concrete on the ramps near aircraft gates. After stepping up the work since the terrorist attacks and the subsequent 25 percent downturn in the airline business, the total expenditure for 2001 reached nearly $6 million, Kosiba said.

He added that a new bidding process has reduced the city's construction costs.

One of O'Hare's seven runways is traditionally repaired each year. But under the accelerated schedule, officials turned their attention toward decaying pavement that was up to 40 years old in several ramp areas.

The Aviation Department formerly delegated to the airlines some pavement replacement in the tightly congested ramp areas closest to the aircraft gates and reimbursed them. But a lot of the needed work wasn't getting done in recent years.

The situation became so serious that a slab of concrete in one ramp area would heave up and down when an aircraft taxied over it, officials said.

"We took the work away from the airlines because we weren't satisfied with the progress they were making in doing badly needed repairs," one official said. "Airline operational types are less interested in keeping up the airport infrastructure than they are in attending to their day-to-day schedules."

Aviation Commissioner Thomas Walker said the city cut construction costs 10 percent by using competitively bid term agreements rather than the traditional method of seeking bids from contractors for specific projects.

Under term agreements, companies submit bids based on a unit cost--in this case, replacing a square foot of pavement. The successful bidder isn't immediately told whether the work will involve resurfacing a runway on the north side of the terminal complex or holding pads on the south airfield.

"Term agreements give us more flexibility to start and stop projects, taking advantage of lulls in traffic and getting the same price regardless of the specific job that's being done," Kosiba said.

Many of the extra repairs have focused on aircraft parking aprons outside United Airlines' F and G Concourses and American Airlines' H and K Concourses. Gates that had been kept open but were underused because of flight schedule reductions were closed by the city for repairs, and planes were directed to other gates, Kosiba said.

The city also rehabbed O'Hare's longest runway, moving up the project by several months.

Officials said it probably will be the last time the 13,000-foot runway is resurfaced. It will be demolished to make way for a western access road and new terminal complex under Mayor Richard Daley's $6.6 billion plan to expand and modernize the airport.